Greetings! As spring approaches you will see a lot of exciting new developments happening around our school. . . . First, we will be expanding the garden and adding a few more planting areas to allow all of our students the ability to get their hands in the earth and grow something beautiful (and/or tasty). The 1st graders have been actively helping the expansion process (as you can see in the photos below). We will also be setting up a small pop-up greenhouse within the next few days on the 2nd floor terrace (between the art and handwork rooms). This will allow us to have experiential lessons about the food cycle — from seed to table. Next fall, we will save our seeds in order to “close-the-loop” and make our garden more self-sufficient and teach our students that they don’t need to relay on  a store for everything. An herb spiral will be this year’s most interesting new garden feature (but I’ll save that for another post). Beyond expanding our gardening efforts, we plan to get the earthoven cleaned up and re-coated with a few new layers of clay… our hope is that we’ll be making pizzas (with some of our early blooming garden crops) by the end of the school year.

Below you will find photos of our 1st graders who are always eager to work in the garden during recess. . . .

And here is what some students thought up to do with the sod we digging up. . . .